Social Media Marketing Predictions to Watch for 2014

If you have been using Social Media or are planning to use in in 2014 there are 11 change and trends to expect during 2014.

The major platforms have been making changes to generate money and this will continue. If you are interested in the complete analysis, you can check out the original story at the link to the right of this story.

Here are the Key Highlights from Social Media Examiner and 12 social media pros.

#1: The Resurgence of Advertorial: Jay Baer

“Several trends and technologies will reach maturity in 2014 spawning considerable disruption in social media, but I believe native advertising and sponsorship will have the greatest impact. It’s a back-to-the-future scenario.”

#2: Employee Advocacy: Neal Schaffer

“My prediction for 2014 is that employee advocacy will become a strategic initiative for more and more large companies.”

#3: Facebook Forces a Strategic Refocus: John Haydon

With Facebook squelching updates from pages, small “businesses and nonprofits will have to scrap the old approach of spamming the news feed and refocus in three ways.”

“In 2014, these tools won’t be just for the brands with big media budgets. Once A/B testing tools for social media are rolled out, we’ll see an increase in the quality of content distributed across networks. This will have an enormous impact on social media marketing, if brands take advantage.”

#5: Pay to Play: Dave Kerpen

“Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to hurt organic reach. Twitter is a public company that must drive revenues and Google+ has introduced ads.”

#6: Fusion Marketing and Fusion Dashboards: Viveka von Rosen

“I believe fusion marketing is going to become a very common catchphrase for us in 2014, and fusion marketing dashboards will be developed and available for us in the very near future.”

#7: Social Storytelling Will Shift: Simon Mainwaring

“As a brand leadership firm that helps large corporations define and share their brand stories through social marketing, we constantly witness the struggle companies face to reconcile their existing cultures and marketing strategies with the new demands of real-time, mobile customer engagement.”

#8: The Age of Advocacy: Ekaterina Walter

“With the hundreds of thousands of products launching every year and the amount of digital noise increasing exponentially, brands need a solution that allows them to distinguish themselves from that noise.”

#9: Paid Social Becomes a Requirement for Social Media Marketers: Michael Stelzner

“As social networks become more accountable to public shareholders, they will begin implementing “traditional” business models requiring that marketers “pay to play.” The organic marketing benefits of social media will continue to decline.”

#10: Brand-Owned Network List-Building Matures: Paul Colligan

“Mark Zuckerberg has a network of a billion people—perhaps you’ve heard of it. Google has a video platform that sees a billion uniques a month. Apple has received more than a billion podcast subscriptions. 200 million users send 400 million tweets each day. We’ve built their networks, and we did a good job.”

#11: Interactive Video Becomes Viable: Mark Schaefer

“I think this is the year we’ll see a real breakthrough in interactive video. When you think about it, our relationship with video has not changed significantly since 1950. Basically, we ‘observe.’ ”